Oil and Gas Engineering Management & Department Handling and Leadership Procedures
Anbarasan Muthiah, MBA, PMP®
Project Manager | Project Delivery Manager | Package Manager | Regulatory Compliance Consultant | PMC | ISO Lead Auditor QMS
ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT
The first task of the Engineering Manager is to clarify the Project technical baseline in the Engineering Design Data.
The Engineering Manager dispatches the Project technical exhibits to the various disciplines. Each discipline reviews its scope of work and identifies any missing information, which is requested from the Client by mean of an Engineering Query which is numbered and tracked to closure.
Each discipline establishes its Design and Criteria and gets them approved by the Client.
Each discipline produces its list of documents with planned issue dates consistent with the Project schedule. These list are consolidated into the Master Document Register.
The Engineering Manager shall clarify the split of Engineering work. Engineering activities are indeed usually performed by several parties including local Engineering Sub-contractors and construction contractors.
Some Detailed installation drawings are commonly left to the Construction(builder) contractor. I is very common, for instance, that small pipe line, secondary cable trays, ect are left to the Construction contractor to route and purchase.
This must defined in the Project Engineering Plan, which contains a split of responsibility matrix between the Engineer and other parties.
The main responsibility of the Engineering Manager is to make sure that Engineering deliverables are issued on-time to support the project execution schedule. In other words the Engineering Manager's responsibility is to ensure that engineering progress as planned.
There are several ways to measure Engineering progress, as follows:
The Physicals progress is calculated on the basis of number of documents actually issued versus number of documents planned to be issued at each given date . it is called physical progress as it measure the amount of physical Engineering production, i.e documents issued.
Even physical progress given an idea about how much Engineering has produced, and is widely used for progress payment for this reason, it does not tell if Engineering is working as per the project priorities.
it gives a quantitative measure of Engineering progress to which a qualitative approach must be added, by looking at whether the documents issued by Engineering are indeed the ones required to be issued as per the Project schedule priorities.
This qualitative approach can be done by looking at the schedule up-dates which shows the critical engineering activities.
The physical progress does not show if Engineering is efficient. To measure the productivity, the number of manhours spent must be compared to that planned to be spent for the work having been done, i.e for the physical progress achieved.
Large number of individual drawings which open varying amount of Workfront to site. The drawing of a small foundation, for instance, opens significantly less Workfront to site that that of a large and complex one.
Controlling the progress of issue of construction drawings on large project is not easy. Indeed , there is a large number of individual drawings. In addition, not all drawings have the same value for site, that of a small foundation and that of la large and complicated one bring significantly different work volume to site.
What is important is that Engineering provides enough Workfront to site. i.e enough quality of work on issued drawings to fully employ manpower and equipment.
Vendor drawings of in-line instruments, control valves and PSVs valves are required to issue piping isometrics. Indeed, their dimension are not standard and resut from the sizing by the vendor. Corresponding Material requisitions shall therefore be issued at an early stage.
Certified final vendor drawings showing the as fabricated positions of piping connections on equipment and packages are also required.
Obtaining these drawings is always a challenge hence controlling and expediting their submissions by Vendors is required.
The Progress measures described above are lagging indicators, they record the past performance. Leading progress control must also be implemented, which includes setting intermediate targets to disciplines, using the look-ahead approach:
the Engineering Manger extracts from the MDR the Look-Ahead Schedule, or "to do list" for the coming period, showing to each discipline the list of documents that must be issued during the coming period.
Review is made at the end of the period that all documents have indeed been issued. Reason for delays are identified and addressed.
The Quantitative approach must be completed by a qualitative one, focused on documents on the critical path of the project. These documents are shown on the Project schedule up-dates.
The Engineering Manager identifies the activities that are critical for example next 3 month: line is IFH, HAZOP Action list cleared and PIDs IFD. These are the tasks on which to focus attention. The other activities, such as SIL review even though delays are no on the critical path hence their delay will not impact project completion date.
In order to prevent schedule delays, the Engineering Manager shall track and expedite what constitutes the main risks to Engineering activities.
In order to be pro-active and anticipate issues before they materialize, the Engineering Manager organizes weekly co-ordination meeting with all the Engineering disciplines. the main purpose of the meeting is to identify the date awaited by one discipline from the other.
METHODS & TOOLS
The design is performed in accordance with published Engineering codes, Client's specifications as well as criteria and rules defined by the Engineer.
I is essential that the bases of design are defined and approved by the Client out prior to that start of design activities.
To this each each discipline shall issue a Design Specification, also called Specification for Design or Design Philosophy
The process Design Criteria specification, for instance, states the margin between operating and design conditions, the percentage of overdesign for equipment , typically 10% the equipment and line sizing rules, ect.
The Civil / steel structural design criteria specification states the code, loads and load combinations considered in the design of foundation and structures.
The Piping design design basis specifies the amount of free space provided on pipe racks for future line, ect.
The design specifications of the other disciplines are the safety concept, the plant layout Guidelines, the Health and Environmental Requirements, the Instrumentation and Control System Design basis, the Piping stress Analysis Criteria , the Electrical system design specification, etc.
Engineering companies develop internal Design Guidelines.
Oil and Gas Facilities process, unit, equipment and materials are always the same. Deliverables produced on one job are the starting point for the next similar job. To ensure this process is effective, a codification by material type is applied to documents. This allows quick retrieval of all documents pertaining to particular commodity, including vendor documents, from previous jobs.
Template are maintained, which collect feed back. When ordering a particular type of equipment, for instance, one starts from the template that have been consolidated while ordering similar equipment on previous jobs. The latter will include a comprehensive check list to precisely define the limits of supply and scope of services on extended / complex supplies for instance.
Check list capitalize the experience from one job to the next. Should an issue of vibration of small piping connections be encountered on a job, for instance, check that a bracing is provided on all small bore connections will be added to the piping isometric check sheet.
Internal procedures of Engineering companies define:
Engineering disciplines work as per the Engineering Design Quality Plan which includes:
§ Master Document Schedule
§ Identification of Documents
§ Identification of Formats
§ Revision Control
§ Document Distribution, Review and Approval
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§ Check, Approval & Issue authorities
§ Quality Systems Documents Control
§ Engineering Documents Control
§ Distribution of documents
§ Control Status, Retention of Check Copies and Master Prints
§ Control of External Documents
§ Control of Documents and Data in Electronic Media
o Protection of Electronic Data: Security of Documents and Data
§ Control of Quality Records
§ Quality System Records
§ Project Records
· Internal Quality Audit
o Internal Quality Audit Procedure
· Competence Management
o Project Specific Training Provision
o Induction Programme & Evaluation
o Skill Chart
· Infrastructure Management
o Process sequence Infrastructure Provision
o Maintenance of Hardware
o Software Resources
o Software Control and Maintenance
· Enquiry Processing
· Engineering Processing
o Technical Queries
o Weekly Progress Monitoring
o Project Completion
o Confidentiality of Customer Documents
· Design Control Process
o Design and Development Planning
o Design Inputs
o Design Outputs
o Design Review
o Design Verification
o Checks
o Single Discipline Checking
o Inter Discipline Checking
o Marking & Checking
o Design Validation and approval (Customer reviews)
o Technical Queries and Engineering Changes
o Review of Client Design
· NC Control Corrective and Preventive Actions
o Action in case of failures found after the issue of drawings to Customer
o Corrective and Preventive Actions
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